Why posterity matters

July 30, 2009

First David Brooks, then Tyler Cowen and now Francesca Rheannon got me thinking this week about posterity and legacy and why they matter so much. Francesca, who is our guest blogger today, is a contributing writer at CSR Wire (where this originally ran) and a host and co-director of SeaChange Radio, an excellent over-the-air and Internet-distributed series of conversations about sustainability. I’m a regular listener on iTunes, and part of SeaChange’s advisory board.

Americans are inconsistent when it comes to long-term thinking. As individuals, we are able to plan for the future–we save for our kids’ college education, or our own retirement. But in business, people often focus on the next deal, the next headline or the next quarter at the expense of the future. I’ve found that when I’m facing an important decision, or even a trivial one (“Should go out for a muffin or a run?), thinking long-term points me towards an answer. “Thinking past ourselves” is the way Francesca puts it.

When my granddaughter starts kindergarten this September, she’ll be going to PS 11, a public school set in the heart of a predominantly African-American community in Brooklyn, NY.

Francesca Rheannon

The school has pledged itself to a sustainable future for children. The day I visited, enormous, colorful cutouts of animals and sea creatures festooned the halls. It turns out the displays were part of the school partnership with Amnesty International, which guides every grade in adopting a cause. The early grades chose the environment: preserving the rain forest, keeping the planet’s waters clean, and saving animals from extinction. The connection between human rights and the right to a healthy environment for all living beings was implicit. The kids also get the connection between a healthy environment and personal health: they grow vegetables together in the community garden next door to the school. All these activities show the core of the school’s philosophy: “the importance of children thinking past themselves,” in the words of the school’s principal. It seems to me to be the core concept of sustainability, as well.

“Thinking past ourselves” was embodied in an award given out this week to three young farmers by the nation-wide farmer’s cooperative, Organic Valley. The “Gen-O Award (for “Generation Organic”) honors farmers between 18 and 35 for their commitment to organic farming. Like P.S. 11, the connection between the environment and the community is made, as the award also recognizes the winnners’ contributions to the preservation of the family farm and rural community through their “leadership, stewardship and innovation“.

Mitch Lucero of Idaho was one winner. He’s an example of how the stewardship of older generations can preserve a sustainable future for their descendants: his family farm was founded in 1907, and went officially organic in 2006 (it was mostly organic before that). He’s also looking to new ways of using old technologies: wind power and water conservation in farming.

Casey Knapp also won the award. The twenty year-old farmer from Preble, New York, grew up on his family’s organic farm. In addition to working on the farm, he’s a “farmer ambassador” for Organic Valley, helping to spread the message of organic agriculture both here and abroad. In May, he was invited to the 17th session of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development, where he participated in the youth caucus to help change happen on a global level.

Meanwhile, back at PS 11, the kids are on school vacation. Most come from low-income families, and are therefore at high risk for obesity. The obesity epidemic among the poor is driven by the high cost of fresh produce and the low cost of high fat, high sugar/salt foods, as the new movie Food, Inc. makes clear. But it’s not just the lack of healthy food that’s to blame.

Poor kids who live in dangerous neighborhoods have even less access to outdoor play because they are kept inside for their own safety. Obesity is skyrocketing among children, as are its attendant ills of Type 2 diabetes, and even high blood pressure. That’s threatening the sustainability of our health care system, as these life-long illnesses will place a heavy burden on an already overstrained system. It also shows that access to safe neighborhoods, affordable healthy food, and outdoor play are basic human rights.

One organization that’s doing its part to promote outside play is KaBoom!, a national non-profit dedicated to bringing play back into the lives of children. It helps parents and communities build playgrounds and it is currently promoting “Play Day 2009“, a nine day event to promote play among the America’s families. The group also has guidelines for ecofriendly service projects you can do with your kids, so children can “think past themselves” and help the planet.

Creating a sustainable future happens one child at a time, but it takes all the generations working together to make it a reality. I’ll be thinking about that when my granddaughter mounts the stairs to her new school for the first time.

Comments

Francesca, you write well and your sentiments are sweet. But it is disappointing to see you pedaling the old shibboleths about organic farming. If we are going to indeed “think past ourselves” then we must think forward rather than to some mythical bucolic period in the past.

Organic farming is fine for those who can afford the premium to pay for the lower yields. If we are going to feed the hungry, we have got to think sustainable, and that means using science and technology to boost yields, conserve soil and improve nutrition.

You don’t have to be a defender of the industrial food production system to acknowledge that certified organic farming is thinking backward.

Peter,
One of the reasons organic farming is so “expensive” is that the true–and much more expensive–costs of conventional farming are externalized, and hence borne, but not counted, by society, the environment and future generations. In addition to greenhouse gas emissions, soil depletion, pesticide and herbicide contamination, dead zones in the oceans from agricultural runoff, epidemic rates of obesity and diabetes from our corn-based diet, and other sequelae too numerous to mention, you can add the wholescale devastation of midwestern rural America, where the meth industry has supplanted farming as one of the only sources of high incomes and families have been eaten alive by the drug’s consequences (I just finished reading Nick Reding’s METHLAND, which makes a strong case for linking the meth epidemic and the oligopolization of agriculture).

Furthermore, conventional agriculture is heavily subsidized. If we turned the model on its head and subsidized organic farming, while making the 5 to 7 big companies that control conventional farming internalize the cost of the type of agriculture they practice, the costs of organic would fall. How about starting with food stamps for organic food, coming from farmers markets, CSA’s, and neighborhood grocery stores? That would help to erode the “food deserts” in low income areas.

Nuestras Raices, a major urban agriculture enterprise by and serving poor, Latino neighborhoods in Holyoke, MA (which I helped to found) runs a 30 acre organic farm, an organic bakery, numerous community gardens, and a canning operation, and sells at farmers’ markets around the region. If they and groups like them received subsidies, instead of Cargill and Monsanto, their model could spread far and wide, changing lives, as well as diets.